Tragic…

I’ve been a critic of Dennis Franchione for a while. Since October 29, 2005 to be exact… that’s when Iowa State came into Kyle Field and beat the Aggies 42-14.

I forgave his first year, his second was an improvement. But in his third year, 2005, things fell apart. A fourth year win-loss record of 9-4 was great, but the truth was, eight of those nine teams we beat were really bad, and we struggled to beat some of them. The exception was Texas, who really was a shadow of their national championship team the prior year. This year went about like I expected, with the exceptions of Nebraska being so bad and Kansas being so good.

Then came last Friday and an absolute domination of the #13 Texas Longhorns. The final score of 38-30 is somewhat deceptive, the Aggies put it on them early and had a 21 point lead halfway into the fourth quarter. The difference was a completely different offensive gameplan than the Aggies had shown all year, and a fire I haven’t seen from Dennis Franchione… well… ever.

What’s really sad is that that type of play is what this team has been capable of all along, and Texas is a lot better than some of the teams that beat us in the weeks leading up to the game. If we had played that way all year, Franchione would still be our coach. In a year when the Big 12 South Champion has two losses, he very well might have been preparing for the conference championship game in San Antonio on Saturday, and possibly even a bigger trophy.

We saw on Friday, unfortunately for the first (and last) time, the coach we hired back in 2002.